


The Mohs Scale of War

by buckstiel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Howling Commandos - Freeform, POV Jim Morita, POV Second Person, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-09-30
Packaged: 2018-02-19 05:21:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2376206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Agent Carter tried to make her sadness lay down to die in the mountains, to make herself crunch forward with broken stalks of a baby-green field in her wake, but it always latched on to her ankles and rode her heels back to bed. You could tell. It was so obvious when someone was a mirror."</p><p>Rogers and Barnes fell but it didn't stop the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mohs Scale of War

**Author's Note:**

> Minor references to the opening scene in 2.01 of Agents of SHIELD.

It's times like these you tend to think back to the late nights outside the tents at the height of it all. 

Italy, Germany, Austria, anywhere, lead cooling in the snowy wake of your footsteps, and Dernier's wide grin would have cast the rest of his face in lanky shadows could they have risked a fire. He would drop a joke, voice half laughter already, and only Gabe would laugh, and Falsworth would mutter something about making a mental note to tell Rogers and Barnes that knee-slapper in the morning. By that time of night, when the cold had  _really_ set in--not any of that wannabe shit when the sun was still making an effort to warm you through the clouds--Rogers and Barnes had always already left. Barnes would turn in early, and sometimes Rogers would follow him into their tent to speak in tense barely-there whispers, and other times he would be turned away. Would stake a spot out at the base of a tree, a distant smudge in the dark. Most nights, Barnes would bring him back by the time Dum Dum turned in; you couldn't speak for the rest.

("They're damn weird," Dum Dum muttered into his canteen after one such night.)

But that was the chorus to the song of whizzing bullets and crunching snow and when you knew all the words in your blood you were trying not to spill, it quieted. The verses boomed louder, like cannons: Dernier slipping a spider into Falsworth's jacket pocket, Gabe and Dum Dum arguing over the correct pronunciation of some seafood you'd definitely never seen at a Fresno market. And then there were the verses that made the blood sing through your veins to your heart like you were actually going to get warm again, and it was when they all stopped the wisecracking and spoke without the lighthearted lilt.

"My ma's gonna ask me about all this when I get home and I don't know how I'm gonna talk about it so she knows," Gabe said. There was a pause, and any other time someone would have already made a joke. You saw his eyes firmly cemented where the fire should be, right in the center of the oranges and purples where it would burn a dark grey. "Words don't stick to things here."

"Or to people," you added. "And if they do, they don't make sense."

"How d'you mean?"

"I was writing to my sister, said Agent Carter reminded me a lot of her." And oh did she ever. Your Beth could make a man stop talking mid-syllable with an arrow of a glare and honed the craft too often with the other chemistry majors at Oberlin. "And I was trying to tell her, y'know? And the best I could come up with was that her presence was a lot like getting smacked in the face with a handful of rubies."

That's the image you always come back to now. Those goddamn rubies. You weren't looking hard enough, as it turned out, or maybe it was the ripple effect of your two COs getting snuffed out as quick as candles in pits of ice and rock. 

You saw it in your first sting op after Rogers died. You and Falsworth went with Agent Carter into the closest Hydra lair to the SSR base as the crow flies, and she has always marched forward with purpose, precise, no boot print out of place, but there was something harder in how she reloaded her gun and tightened the pins in her hair. The kill shots went straight through the centers of their foreheads and she had moved on before the last dramatic flop of their wrist upon the ground. When she gave you orders, she looked anywhere but your face or your jacket sleeve. 

And Dum Dum back at the mobile base had the unfortunate notion to call her Captain Carter, give a salute and merrily slap the wing on his sleeves and you all feared for half a second you were going to have to plan a third funeral already. Dropping like flies because they were all just a little too brave. 

But Dum Dum lived. Agent Carter pursed her lips and pushed into her tent, the phantom echo of a door slamming pulling a wince onto your face. Most times it was easy to forget you all were grieving, thinking about giving in to the weights curling around your ribs and stomachs and laying on the ground. The war would march around you as you watched new blades of grass chisel through the thinning icy dew. 

Agent Carter tried to make her sadness lay down to die in the mountains, to make herself crunch forward with broken stalks of a baby-green field in her wake, but it always latched on to her ankles and rode her heels back to bed. You could tell. It was so obvious when someone was a mirror.

But it's times like these--months later now, with spring gushing forward in the foothills--on your umpteenth sting mission with Agent Carter, Dum Dum learning where to point his snark (outward along the barrel of his gun, not vaguely into chasms and ice floes), it's the time you really realize how wrong you've become. What you thought were rubies flinging through the smoke of grenades were diamonds soaked in blood and you have to shield yourself from the spray.

She orders the box sealed and labeled with an 084, each syllable a scratch at the grief still biting up her legs. So you do. You seal it. You watch the metal bubble and cool on itself, watch a slow dribble of crimson pool at the top of her boot and creep along the threads of the cloth tucked neatly into them above the knot of laces.

She won't bleed out--you know better than to worry about that, you all do. But you wonder about the scars from those nails and teeth digging toward toward the bones. The sharp throbbing. How she walks without limping. 

"War's a kind of anesthetic," Falsworth said one night. There had been a small Hydra outpost hiding out in a bombed-out beer garden and it had been simple business to lift a few bottles that hadn't been shattered to bits. He had thrown out the remark and immediately wrapped his lips around the second bottle for a deep chug, slapping Dernier's hand away. "You drank most of the first one, for goodness sake--" But he handed it over anyway and grinned down at his hands when Gabe playfully shoved Dernier in the arm after yet another joke no one else was in on. 

More hushed whispers than normal were coming from Rogers and Barnes' tent, and in the light of the full moon you could see the beginnings of shadows. Barnes was curled in on himself and his faint silhouette was joined at the shoulder by that of Rogers' hand. "What I was trying to say was..." Falsworth continued, "...was that--you can't quite feel much of anything when there's the pressure of a gun in your face." Their tent was behind him and there was a half-hearted effort at nodding back to the COs. "When you're not fighting for your life, you're left to pick at the scabs and poke at what you've just remembered could still rip back open."

Pressure. Too much of it, turning you into a molten thing. Leaving you to burn up before it does any good for you. But it does cauterize the wound.

Falsworth was wrong too, then, if only a little, because his theory was fine in the Bavarian night but here with Agent Carter the pressure has already done its job. It can't crush her into anything else, can't take the carbon in her jaw and push it into a more regimented structure--but you, oh you and the other commandos have felt your atoms shifting since the day you set foot on a battlefield, the seismic plates deep in your bones grinding until the rumble was just white noise under the clanking of tanks.

Back at the base, the real one in bricks and mortar, she disappears into her office, only sparing a few words to Gabe when his brow does that thing Dum Dum would always comment on--"oh stop your worrying, Barnes is gonna be just fine," he would say. Gabe's hand twitches like he wants her to wait, but the door shuts and there's a distinct click of a lock, scrape of a chair on the floor--slam of a fist on wood. So you wonder about alchemy for the first time since the start of this whole goddamn war, since your father came home one night and with a trembling hand on your mother's wrist and said,  _we have to leave Fresno, we have to leave Fresno._ Somehow in the span of a few hours he had gone from a rock to ice cracking as it lay in chilled water, and only magic could do that, magic and bombs. They left for Ohio and you enlisted before the internments started, before you could see him melt completely. 

Agent Carter's diamond was trickling down to talc as the seconds ticked by, transmutation of the highest order if it was managing to fuck with her. Her of all people. And you know you don't know her well enough to speculate successfully, but you know enough about Rogers to extrapolate. You saw him after you all got Zola off the train. You saw the way his own hardness dissolved into talc. He wouldn't move. You, Gabe, and Dernier on all sides couldn't get him to his feet, not with your own scratches puffing up and breaking the skin of something so deep in you that you hadn't even known it was there.

Rogers needed the strength of many men to start walking again.

You heard that after Rogers went down in the plane, Agent Carter sat alone at the controls for ten minutes before standing up, straightening her skirt, and marching back to join the top brass back in the strategy room.

(You think about your father and how he only let himself tremble, and how your mother wrote you at basic training-- _yes, Cleveland is fine, your father's had some heart trouble, been sick a bit lately, but Beth made honor roll again, we're so proud._ Repression as pressure to build your own volcano to burn your heart out from the inside.)

When she emerges later for dinner, there isn't a bobby pin out of place or a single smudge along her eyes.

"How is she?" you ask Gabe over your forkful of mashed potatoes.

"She's fine," he says, but he makes no attempt at stopping his brow from doing That Thing when he sneaks a glance at her across the room. She's not fine but she wants you to think she is. She's not fine but she knows one day it will hurt less and there won't be blood gathering around her ankles. She's not fine but there's still a war to be won, and she won't let herself grow so soft as to lie down in the ice and watch the victory come without her own hand in the fray pulling it out of the rubble. 


End file.
